Brendan Reid, a business writer, author, and coach, points out that strong interviewing skills are critical to the success of any hiring manager. Obviously, bringing people on board who have the right skills, knowledge, experience, and temperament will have enormous benefit to the hiring manager and to the company. […] Continue Reading…

Ken Blanchard has been a prolific writer on topics of management and leadership. He has written over 60 books, though usually co-authored with someone else. If you’re old enough, you may remember his classic work, “The One Minute Manager.” I recently stumbled across one of his books, “The Secret: […] Continue Reading…

In a recent blog, we posed the question, “Do we live to work or work to live?” and used that as a springboard to talk about Millennials. There doesn’t seem to be any agreement on specific beginning and ending dates for this generation, but it’s generally thought to be […] Continue Reading…

A lot has been written lately about “employee engagement” . . . some of it right here. The Gallup organization, which has studied it for many years, says employee engagement can be measured by the strength of the emotional connection an employee feels toward his or her company. If […] Continue Reading…

Americans work hard . . . at least they work longer hours than their counterparts in the world’s largest economies. On average, an adult fulltime worker in this country works 47 hours a week. If you filter out hourly workers and consider only salaried workers, that number rises to […] Continue Reading…

Even though the Great Recession is far back in our rearview mirror, the recovery has been painfully slow, particularly for small businesses. Small business owners have not gone on a hiring spree, in part, because they have learned how to get along without some of the positions they eliminated […] Continue Reading…

Simon Sinek is one of our favorite speakers on business topics. In our last posting, we talked about one of his “10 Rules for Success” . . . namely, the importance of continuous improvement. He challenges us to ask, every day, “How can we make our company a better […] Continue Reading…

For most of us, when we think about innovation, we think about companies like Apple, Microsoft, or Google. We think about breakthrough, disruptive technologies like the GraphicalUser Interface which took access to the Worldwide Web from the hands of a few geeks who could write computer code and gave […] Continue Reading…

If you’re not a hockey fan, the name John McDonough probably doesn’t mean much to you. But if you’re a Chicago Blackhawks fan, you probably have a shrine to him somewhere in your home. He joined the Blackhawks in 2007 as President, and under his stewardship, the team’s season […] Continue Reading…

The stereotypical entrepreneur is a guy running around with his or her hair on fire, pushing all the buttons, pulling all the levers, and wearing all the hats. We’re all wired a little bit differently, but ultimately, we all reach the limit of what we can do alone, and […] Continue Reading…